Richard Rhodes

The story of the postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade. Drawing on a wealth of new documentation, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s led Soviet leader Andropov to conclude that Reagan must be preparing for a nuclear war. In 1983, when NATO staged a larger than usual series of field exercises, the Soviet military came very close to launching a defensive first strike. Then Reagan launched the arms-reduction campaign of his second presidential term and set the stage for his 1986 summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Rhodes reveals the early influence of neoconservatives, demonstrating how the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation, which the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify current 'war on terror' and the disastrous invasion of Iraq, were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before.--From publisher description.

This book discusses the work of criminologist Dr. Lonnie Athens and uses Dr. Athens's theory and historical evidence to explain the violent careers of Perry Smith, Alex Kelly, Mike Tyson, Lee Harvey Oswald, and others.

It lurks in the meat we eat. Undetectable, it incubates for years. It kills by eating holes in people's brains, so that they stagger and collapse and lose their minds. It's one hundred percent fatal. And it's already abroad in America. Deadly Feasts reads like a Michael Crichton thriller - but it's documented fact, bringing sober early warning of a new threat to our very lives that every one of us needs to heed. In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes follows the daring explorations of maverick scientists as they track the emergence of the deadly "stealth" maladies known as prion diseases - strange new disease agents unlike any others known on earth. Mad cow disease is one. Besides hundreds of thousands of cattle, young people in Britain and France have already died from it - died from eating beef. Beginning with a cannibal feast in New Guinea only a few decades ago that killed everyone who partook, Rhodes shows this mysterious group of human and animal diseases spreading gradually throughout the world, infecting and killing laboratory animals; patients in surgery; herds of sheep, cattle, mink, deer and elk; children treated with human growth hormone; and now, ominously, healthy young people in Britain and on the Continent. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announcement in early 1997 of drastic measures to prevent an outbreak of mad cow disease in the United States confirmed what Rhodes reveals and explores in detail: that Americans who eat meat are almost certainly already at risk.

Here for the first time, in rich, human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly -- or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the Bomb with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers -- Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and Von Neumann -- stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight. [source]

YA. Graphic Novel. The post-apocalyptic Dungeons & Dragons setting's first-ever comic! Beneath a crimson sun lie wastelands of majestic desolation and cities of cruel splendor, where life hangs by a thread. Welcome to Athas! When an imprisoned gladiator named Grudvik escapes the city of Tyr, a part-time slave hunter and full-time dune trader is hired to bring back the fugitive. But after crossing swords, the pair must join forces to survive the harsh desert.

Describes the lesser-known technological talents of actress Hedy Lamarr and the collaborative work with avant-garde composer George Antheil that eventually led to the development of spread-spectrum radio, cell phones, and GPS systems.

"Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author Richard Rhodes relates the remarkable story of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of the reporters, writers, artists, doctors, and nurses who witnessed it. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. The idealism of the cause--defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war--and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia, The Spanish Earth. The war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology as well. New aircraft, new weapons, new tactics and strategy all emerged in the intense Spanish conflict. Indiscriminate destruction raining from the sky became a dreaded reality for the first time. Progress also arose from the horror: the doctors and nurses who volunteered to serve with the Spanish defenders devised major advances in battlefield surgery and front-line blood transfusion. In those ways, and in many others, the Spanish Civil War served as a test bed for World War II, and for the entire twentieth century" --